If a company’s in the Fortune 100 and its information technology budget has a whole bunch of zeroes, then their cloud options are pretty much endless. If, however, it is a mid-market business with a slight IT staff and modest budget, an all-in push to the Amazon Web Services Inc. Cloud might not be in the cards just yet. For them, a step-at-a-time on-ramp to cloud via a disaster recovery solution might be a more realistic option.

VMware Inc. is offering that much to mid-market customers, according to Ruya Atac-Barrett (pictured, left), vice president of marketing, data protection, at Dell EMC. Cloud as a disaster recovery site is something that many mid-market businesses are expressing interest in, she added. Some in this domain may not have a secondary site, so the convenience of backing up to the cloud is particularly attractive. The cloud can serve as a space for DR or for long-term data retention.

Atac-Barrett and Brian Linden (pictured, right), IT director at Melanson Heath and Co. PC, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed VMware’s new Integrated Data Protection Appliance DP4400, DR trends, and the needs of mid-market businesses. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud DR for mid-market ground troops

“We’re seeing a trend toward wanting to have flash NVMe cache to be able to actually do instant access and restore, not only for recoverability purposes, but for app test and dev type applications and data sharing,” Atac-Barrett said.

DP4400 provides complete protection of VMware environments. “You can manage it directly from your VMware operational tools and have access to cloud as a secondary site, whether it’s for DR or long term retention,” she added.

Linden’s organization was the very first DP4400 customer. “I have a very lean IT shop. We don’t have a lot of time, a lot of people to be devoting hours and days and weeks to getting a data protection environment set up,” Linden said. “Our previous solutions were much more complicated — different interfaces, changing interfaces … and they didn’t really work well.”

By contrast, DP4400 was easy to deploy, has just one interface, and does not require users to interrupt production to perform backup and protection tasks, Linden explained. In short, it grants “me and my staff the power to do what we need to do without having to have a degree in data protection,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. Dell, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE